On PHPClasses.org today there's a new post from Manuel Lemos suggesting that one of the main reasons why PHP is popular is because of WordPress, not the frameworks that have been built with it.

Recently the Tiobe Index of published an update of their programming language index on which they claim PHP has been raising in popularity due to Zend Framework 2 but they do not justify why. Read this article to learn about an opinion why this claim is unfounded and PHP popularity has more to do with WordPress than with PHP at one language may be more popular than PHP Frameworks.

In the post he talks some about the TIOBE index, how it ranks popularity and where PHP currently sits on the list. He then lists out seven reasons why he thinks that WordPress made PHP as popular as it is including:

WordPress is the Most Popular PHP Application

WordPress alone is much more popular than any PHP framework

The Extensible WordPress plugin ecosystem

Non-Programmers develop in PHP just because of WordPress

He also suggests that the popularity of WordPress stems from it solving a more pragmatic problem than PHP frameworks